So long had the accents of Cicero's praise lingered in the poet's ear! This extreme susceptibility of praise in men of genius is the same exuberant sensibility which is so alive to censure.

I have elsewhere fully shown how some have died of criticism.[A] The self-love of genius is perhaps much more delicate than gross.
But this fatal susceptibility is the cause of that strange facility which has often astonished the world, by the sudden transitions of sentiment which literary characters have frequently exhibited.

They have eulogised men and events which they had reprobated, and reprobated what they had eulogised.

The recent history of political revolutions has furnished some monstrous examples of this subservience to power.

Guicciardini records one of his own times, which has been often repeated in ours.